Updates, insights, and information about the work being produced at Loveday Studio, the work place for Oliver Loveday. Visual art, poetry, music, and video works are featured in each blog.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Scroll-Making, Contemporary Art, and Star Maps

It started with pottery sometime
around 1974, really. I was an art student taking pottery. One day I
was going through the graduate studio and notice the decoration on
some plates. It was a simple splash of red iron oxide slip under a
whitish-brown glaze. For whatever reason I connected to this stroke
of “controlled accident”. It comes from Japanese Zen pottery, the
graduate student told me. It sent me out there. I felt a sense of
freedom just looking at it. It wasn't that good, his effort, but I
got the spirit of the intent. That was what mattered. I started doing
it on my pots. I did some raku firings and that was even more
invigorating. Liberating. I had found an expression of freedom that
allowed me to shed all the constipated forms of art that surrounded
me at the University.

It wasn't long into my studies that I
broke away from the common form, bowls, teapots, plates, cups, and
started creating sculptures. I loved doing slab pots. I was good on
the potter's wheel and good at hand-built pots, but form and function
in clay sculpture just took me to the slab. I would throw a ball of
clay out on the wedging table until I had a slab and then place it on
a support form and add another, clay slip in between, joining them,
until I had a form. Then I would splash under-glaze slips on the
clay. There was a rhythm to this. It was like music in solid form. I
felt free. I wanted to be able to control these splashes on the clay
better. I started to practice with tempera paints on newsprint. It
was cheap student grade practice material. I would show my newsprint
pad to friends. They liked it. I got better. I could make the splash
curl around the pot where I wanted it to go. Other students tried to
imitate me. My instructors would try their hand at this style I was
developing in my work. They tossed them.

"Blue Mud"

1975

Stoneware and Porcelain

7 x 11 x 13 inches

It was just a matter of time before it
happened. I wasn't just practicing any longer. I was doing paintings
with watercolor on watercolor paper. I read everything about the
Japanese Zen painting style that I could find in the library. I
memorized all the pottery photographs from the Shinto school of
pottery that I could find. I did my background work as a student with
no real hands-on instructor at my side. I looked at all the action
painters' work from contemporary art. They were off doing something
else. We may have been going down parallel paths, but their concerns
were clearly different from mine. I found out about sumi-e ink on
rice paper. I used rice paper for woodcuts in printmaking and loved
that paper. I went to a international student day on campus and
discovered that one of the booths had art supplies for sumi-e ink on
rice paper painting. I bought a couple of bamboo brushes, and ink
stick, and an ink stone. I was doing more with this splash than just
decorating my clay sculptures. I was banging the walls of the
Universe with the spray from my brush.

After graduating from the University
with a degree in Fine Art, I moved up to a log cabin in the
mountains. I had to walk in a good twenty minutes from the road. It
had a fire place. I bought a gas camping stove and carried water in
for cooking and tea. I was a hermit. My mother had given me a roll of
paper. I stapled it to the floor of the porch and started painting on
it with acrylic. It took weeks to complete the painting. I rolled it
up. I knew it was too long to ever display in a gallery. I never
thought of it as a scroll painting. No one has ever seen it since
then. I unrolled it a few times and looked at it but I never showed
it to anyone. At least now I know what I am doing. I bought ten rolls
of rice paper from a vendor at the Knoxville World's Fair in 1982. He
wanted sheets of paper so a calligrapher could write people's names
on it in Chinese. I used that paper for years but never once thought
about rolling some of it out and making a scroll, or doing a long
painting. It just never occurred to me.

"Red Apples"

watercolor on rice paper

12 x 10 in.

January 26, 1986

A recent conversation back in the
winter about my painting style, which has developed beyond how I
started out decorating pottery, and a friend mentioned that no one
has ever done a scroll in my style of painting. I contemplated this
for a few months and could see why no one had attempted this. For one
thing, it is a logistical headache. I solved some of those problems
back in 1976 with that roll of paper on the porch. That would not be
possible where I am living now. I have been painting on small sheets
of rice paper for several years and pushed my techniques even further
than before. On numerous occasions I've produced videos of myself
while working, holding the camera in one hand while painting with the
other. The results are more of a performance piece than a
documentary. I like it that way. I see this as a dance. One should
feel the energy of the body in relation to earth, gravity, physics,
zip of the wrist at the release of ink from the bristles. I am
dancing. I am alive. I have awakened.

It gets complicated trying to do a
scroll painting like this. It has to be a continuous painting. If it
were displayed on the wall completely rolled out it would need to
look like a continuous painting from start to finish. When an artist
is doing a landscape scroll painting he can roll it along with no
problem. When it comes to splash, that isn't going to work. Rather
than go at the challenge head-on, the best approach is to come around
from the side, as in go with what I already know first. Using what I
have to work with keeps it even more simple. I have newspapers and
old fountain pen ink. It is February. It is snowing. “art_snow”
started out in the snow with ten sections of newspapers placed end to
end. Blue-black ink happened. The next day red ink happened. On
February 23, 2015, black ink happened. Each day in the snow and wind
I splashed ink, chased newspapers around with the wind, and
documented as much as I could using my iPhone 5c. On the 23rd
the wind was brisk and I had to pile a lot of snow on the newspapers
to keep them from blowing away. My hands got so cold that when I
tried to change the camera settings from video to photo my fingers
were so cold that the heat-sensitive screen couldn't detect them. So
I stopped taking photographs and took everything inside. Over the
next few days I attached the sheets of newspaper end to end with
clear acrylic polymer to create the scroll. That was a good dry run
at what the challenges were when using what I had.

“art_snow” scroll

ink on 10 sheets of joined newspaper

22.75 x 234 inches | 57.7 x 586.75 cm

February 27, 2015

On April 11, 2015, a shipment of art
supplies arrived and in the box was three rolls of rice paper. I sat
and looked at them real hard. I pulled them out and felt of the
paper. Sometime in the afternoon the smallest and shortest of the
three ended up in the back yard. Wet-on-wet sumi-e ink brush marks
and splash went down. The wind played with the paper several times,
threatening to turn the paper into a kite. I waited until the ink was
dry before rolling the paper up. With a title, date, and signature
this style of painting, this approach to scroll making, happened. I
don't know if it had ever been done before, but I know it is
possible. “Pillow Float” was a lot easier than “art_snow”.

“Pillow Float” scroll

Sumi-e ink on Hosho rice paper roll

8 inches x 20 feet

April 11, 2015

It doesn't take long before the peacock
spreads his tail feathers and we get some color in the mix. “Grass
Float” brought in the watercolor. It also brought in the process of
working on a small section each day. I started out with about three
feet of paper rolled out. The next day I rolled out an additional
three feet and worked on everything that was exposed, so the previous
day's work was tied into the new work so it would appear like that
continuous painting that gives the impression that it was all worked
on at once. The next day I would roll up the first three feet and
roll out three more feet of fresh paper from the other end. This
started on April 24, 2015, and ended on May 7, 2015. As usual, over
1000 photographs were taken to document the process. After the scroll
was completed I started photographing the scroll from start to
finish. The camera on my iPhone died on me, so I haven't completed
that process as of this writing.

“Grass Float” scroll

Watercolor and Sumi-e ink on Shuji Gami
rice paper

18 inches x 30 feet | 45.5 cm x 9.144 m

Completed: May 7. 2015

Now to think back when things were
simpler and manageable, disregarding the dead camera on the iPhone.
The camera on the front, I call it the “selfie camera”, still
works but that leaves me shooting blind if I point it away from me.
So the next roll of paper goes down on the “work space” on the
bank out back where the retaining wall provides a natural bench to
work on. First marks are made with pencil, then oil pastel. I'm rough
on rice paper. Next comes the watercolor. The next day I unroll more
paper and do the process. Every other day I add the sumi-e ink to the
mix. The next day the previous day's work that got the ink gets
worked on, so marks go over the ink. Also, I don't roll up all of the
previous day's work that is completed. I leave a few inches exposed.
So there's a bit of overlap going on all the way through. It gets
complicated. “The Sacred Texts” scroll was started on May 8,
2015. I thought about taking a break in between these two.

Lacking good documentary photographs
for this scroll, I decided to scan the progress on the flatbed
scanner. Since it is 11 inches x 60 feet I can do this. The scanner
bed will take paper a little larger than letter size. Even so, I'm
overlapping some to make sure a little of the previous scan is visble
on the next scan. There was about 15 feet of work already completed
when I came up with the idea, so I went back and scanned that. Now
the problem with scanning the scroll as it progresses is that some of
the previous day's work is exposed, so I need to scan any areas that
got wet. That makes those few inches of the previous day's scan
stale. That doesn't bother me. What might make this problematic is
the decision to post the scans to my “virtual gallery” on
Zazzle.com. If someone wanted to purchase prints of all the scans and
recreate the scroll, the prints won't match up perfectly. The best
way to document the scroll would be to wait until it is finished. I
don't need the stress at this point in the process. So the Universe
gets what I'm dishing out.

“The Sacred Texts”

Pencil, oil pastel, watercolor, and
sumi-e ink

11 inches by 60 feet

Started May 8, 2015

Completion date not determined as of
this writing

Doing a scroll comes with a mental
awareness that is different from regular reality. It is bigger than I
am. I can't experience the entire scroll at once, not even in
creating it. This gives me an experience somewhat akin to watching a
movie. I think about the scrolls that are created to be presented as
a performance. Children get a roll of paper and draw cars and
buildings on it. They roll it up on a stick on either end and put it
inside a cardboard box and create a story screen. Once the scroll is
rolled up and I hold it I feel how sturdy it is. I think about how
people used to use scrolls before there was bookbinding. They are
very easy to transport in lands that are arid or with watertight
containers. Making scrolls, working with them, and looking at them
gives me a sense of connectedness to humanity over a long period of
time. Looking forward, there is information in these scrolls that
will transcend time. My style of painting transcends language
barriers. It transcends physical reality. The information is just as
tangible, will be tangible, to anyone for an unknown period of time
on this planet or anywhere else where visual physical information is
perceptive. It is bigger than me. It is bigger than all of us. I love
science fiction. I could write a novel about any of these scrolls
making a journey to the stars and beyond, used for a star map,
liberating ego-bound seekers, and once in a while used in a “story
screen”. In this movie star travelers use scrolls to navigate with.
In this physical realm, we are the star travelers waiting for our
maps to be replaced. I'm working as hard as I can. Love.